In a Dark Church, Nuances of Sound Turn Symphonic

Eleh at Our Lady of Lebanon Cathedral in Brooklyn Heights

Eleh’s instruments included a modular synthesizer at Our Lady of Lebanon Cathedral on Friday.Credit
Julie Glassberg for The New York Times

Eleh, as he is called, walked down the aisle of Our Lady of Lebanon Cathedral in Brooklyn Heights after all the lights had been shut off and sat cross-legged before his equipment: an old Sequential Circuits analog keyboard synthesizer; a modular synthesizer about the shape of a large cash register, with red, yellow, orange, purple and black patch cables; and a hand-held digital multimeter to measure sound frequencies. You could see his outline only in the tiny readout lights of his gear. He is compact, of middling height and has short hair. Healthy. Maybe mid-30s.

He began playing a melody in slow, single notes. Much of Eleh’s work, which has come out mostly on vinyl over the last six years, tends to explore single tones, or combinations of them, but stretches them out like tarpaulins, changing them subtly in pitch or oscillation into something else. The microscopic becomes symphonic, subtle gradations in tone become immense, pulse waves become rhythm.

This piece immediately sounded different, because a little tune was emerging. But soon it went simpler and deeper, with shuddering low frequencies rubbing against one another competitively, the breadth of a sound measurable only if you heard the different parts within it according to how you turned your head.

The show, on Friday, was Eleh’s fifth ever and his first in the United States. It was part of the Touch.30 festival presented by Issue Project Room, a series of concerts that ended on Sunday by artists associated with the English multimedia entity Touch, which has produced various performances, films and publications for 30 years but is perhaps best known as a record label. (It has released two records by Eleh: the album “Location Momentum” and a piece called “Slow Fade for Hard Sync” on an LP split between Eleh and the Swedish artist Nana April Jun.)

Eleh chooses not to reveal his personal identity. It’s not a joke: neither Touch; nor its American distributor, Forced Exposure; nor Issue Project Room would tell me anything about who he is.

The piece he played was part of something he hasn’t recorded yet: his version of John Coltrane’s “Living Space.” I learned this, with surprise, from talking to Eleh after the show. He asked if he could make his case for artistic anonymity, without being quoted; I agreed, as long as I didn’t have to pretend that we hadn’t talked. He is American, for what it’s worth. This music, which he started playing in the late ’90s, came from a private and placid place; he seems interested in keeping that place as it was.

Issue Project Room put this series in Our Lady of Lebanon on short notice, after part of the ceiling in the organization’s usual Brooklyn home, on Boerum Place, came down in August; it chose well. This was spiritual music. The sound filled the cathedral space so that you could hear the full dimensions of a tone. (The opening act was Lary 7, a New York artist who used a lathe-cutter onstage to record the hum and buzz of the machine itself onto a black disc; and then played back the recording with a tonearm. It was process-oriented, less spiritual and much less attractive as sound.)

Eleh’s performance was not life-changing music, but it was a disposition, a small, powerful idea well embodied, as well as a kind of panegyric for the experiential properties of unusual sound frequencies and the power of modular synthesizers. It ended with a series of long single tones, each lasting about 15 seconds before subsiding and beginning again. After several of them, Eleh quickly rose to his feet and exited through a side door, leading to an area behind the altar. The notes continued for about five minutes before coming to a full stop; the house lights went on, and we in the audience rubbed our eyes.

A version of this review appears in print on September 17, 2012, on page C7 of the New York edition with the headline: In a Dark Church, Nuances Of Sound Turn Symphonic. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe